Rome: Sant’Andrea delle Fratte

We do not know when exactly the first church was built on this spot. This may have been as early as the twelfth century, but we do not have any certainty. What is certain is that there was a church here in the sixteenth century, which in 1585 was granted to friars of the Order of Minims, an order founded in 1435 by Saint Francis of Paola (1416-1507). The church was dedicated to Saint Andrew the Apostle, brother of Saint Peter. The addition of the words “delle Fratte” – “of the thickets” – is an indication that the church was in an overgrown area near the edge of what was then the city of Rome. A few years after their arrival, the Minims decided to build a new church and convent. They made their first attempt between 1604 and 1612, with financial aid from the noble Del Bufalo family. Unfortunately they ran out of money and work was suspended for decades. In 1653 the famous architect Francesco Borromini (1599-1667) was commissioned to get the project going again. Sant’Andrea delle Fratte can with some justification be called a Borromini church: apse, dome and bell-tower are all by him.

Borromini worked on the church until 1665. He was succeeded by Mattia de Rossi (1637-1695), who was unfortunately also plagued by financial trouble. As a consequence, only the lower part of the façade was completed. Visitors will notice that it clearly has a different colour from the upper part, which was only built in the nineteenth century. The text on the façade mentions the year 1826 and the name of cardinal Ercole Consalvi (1757-1824), Cardinal Secretary of State to Pope Pius VII. Tradition claims that Consalvi had sold a particularly valuable snuffbox to be able to finance the completion of the façade. This snuffbox had been a present from the Austrian Minister of Foreign Affairs prince Metternich, presented to the cardinal during the 1815 Congress of Vienna. Regretfully the good cardinal died in early 1824 and therefore did not live to see the completion of the façade. According to one of my travel guides the architect of the upper part of the façade was Giuseppe Valadier (1762-1839).

Visitors entering the church will immediately notice something odd. The first rows of pews and chairs have been oriented towards a large chapel on the left side, while the pews further to the back face the high altar. This remarkable arrangement is related to the miraculous event that took place in the church on 20 January 1842. On that date, the Virgin Mary is said to have appeared in the aforementioned chapel to a secular French Jew called Alphonse Rattisbonne (1814-1884). The apparition caused Rattisbonne to convert to Catholicism and to add the name “Marie” (i.e. Mary) to his own name. He then joined the Jesuits, was ordained as a priest and worked as a missionary in the Holy Land, where he passed away shortly after his seventieth birthday. On a sidenote, his older brother Théodore Ratisbonne had previously converted to Catholicism, and he too had been ordained as a priest.

To the right of the Cappella della Madonna del Miracolo is a bust of Maximilian Kolbe (1894-1941), who in 1918 held his first mass in this chapel. He was a Polish Franciscan friar who was murdered in Auschwitz after he had changed places with another prisoner who had children. The prisoner survived the horrors of the camp and was present at the canonisation of Maximilian Kolbe by Polish pope John Paul II in 1982.

By far the most famous works of art in the church are two marble statues of angels made by Gian Lorenzo Bernini (1598-1680). Bernini had actually made them for the Ponte Sant’Angelo, the bridge next to the Castle of the Angel, but they were never set up there. Pope Clemens IX (1667-1669) thought they were too beautiful to be exposed to the elements. Clemens would have taken the statues to his hometown of Pistoia (see Pistoia: San Domenico), had not his death prevented this. And so the statues remained in the possession of the Bernini family until Bernini’s nephew Prospero donated them to the church of Sant’Andrea delle Fratte in 1729. They were placed in the back of the church, close to the choir and high altar. The angel on the left is holding the crown of thorns that Christ wore, while the angel on the right has the titulus in his hands. This was the sign attached to the cross during the Crucifixion that featured the letters INRI: IESVS NAZARENVS REX IVDEORVM, Jesus of Nazareth, King of the Jews.[1] There is a story that Bernini himself claimed that his son Paolo had made the angel with the titulus. While Paolo was indeed a sculptor like his father, he unfortunately lacked his talent. There can therefore be no doubt at all that the angel is a work by Bernini himself.

The chapel in the left transept is dedicated to Saint Anne, mother of the Virgin. The design of the chapel is by the half-Dutch architect Luigi Vanvitelli (1700-1773), son of an Italian woman and the Dutch painter Caspar van Wittel (1653-1736; the name “Van Wittel” became “Vanvitelli” in Italian). The statue near the altar represents a dying Saint Anne, made by Giovanni Battista Maini (1690-1752). Although I visited the Sant’Andrea delle Fratte for the first time in July of 2024, I had a strong feeling that I had seen the statue before. I then quickly discovered that the statue is basically a copy of a Bernini statue, that of Blessed Ludovica Albertoni in the church of San Francesco a Ripa. Maini’s work may not be very original, but it was executed very well. Near the chapel we also find the grave of the female Swiss painter Angelika Kauffmann (1741-1807), who died in Rome and was buried in this church.

Many of the paintings in the church were done by a painter who is usually called Pasquale Marini in the sources. The number of search results was pretty limited when I googled that name. His full name was actually Andrea Pasqualino Marini, from Recanati in the Marche, where he was born around 1660. Marini presumably died after 1712, but no exact year of death is known. His fresco on the inside of the dome reminds us of the Assumption of the Virgin by Correggio in the cathedral of Parma. The theme is the same, but Correggio’s fresco is infinitely more impressive. The fresco in the conch of the apse is also by Marini. It represents the Multiplication of the Loaves and Fish, a miracle in which Saint Andrew the Apostle played a role. Below the fresco we can read a quote from the Gospel of John: “Andrew (…) spoke up, “Here is a boy with five small barley loaves and two small fish””. Although Andrew had doubts whether this was enough to feed the crowd (“how far will they go among so many?”), the five loaves and two fish proved to be sufficient to feed five thousand men. There was even food left.

The three large paintings in the apse are all about the martyrdom of Saint Andrew. The apostle is crucified on an X-shaped cross, which is the origin of the well-known Saint Andrew’s Cross. The canvases are not by Marini, but by Giovanni Battista Leonardi (or Lenardi; 1656-1704), Lazzaro Baldi (ca. 1624-1703) and Francesco Trevisani (1656-1746) respectively.

Sources

• Capitool travel guide Rome, 2009, p. 132;
• Luc Verhuyck, SPQR. Anekdotische reisgids voor Rome, p. 261-262;
• Sant’Andrea delle Fratte | Churches of Rome Wiki | Fandom

Note

[1] According to John 19:19-20 the text was not just in Latin, but also in Hebrew and Greek.